Commentary

By Claude R. Canizares

June 1999

Our guest column is from Claude
Canizares, Bruno Rossi Professor
of Experimental Physics and Director of
the Center for Space Research at
Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

To paraphrase Mark Twain, recent reports
of the death of discrimination have been
greatly exaggerated. These accounts
accompany a pernicious surge in legal and political
challenges to affirmative action programs,
based in part on the premise that such efforts are
no longer needed. It is true
that significant progress
has been made in swelling
the ranks of both women
and minorities in some
areas where they have been
previously underrepresented,
from Cabinet offices to
Boardrooms to the tenured
ranks of research universities.
The fact that people
bother attacking affirmative action programs is
itself a sign that, whatever their shortcomings,
they have had effect.

In our own discipline signs of progress can be
found in the numbers of women advancing
through all levels, as some of the statistics in this
issue of STATUS indicate.
But, as in many areas of society,
we are nowhere near
where we should be in eradicating
gender bias. Sadly, we
are still much further behind
in building the participation
of minorities. In the half century
it has taken us to erase
all vestiges of devastation in
Europe and Japan, and to
start and end the cold war, we have not managed
to end discrimination.

Where should we be
in terms of the representation
of women in
astronomy? I strongly
believe the only conceivable
answer is that
women, and indeed all
segments of society,
should be represented
roughly in proportion to
their representation in the population at large.
This premise is contained in the Baltimore Charter, and my own thinking on this was very
much sharpened by the discussions at the 1992
STScI meeting on Women in Astronomy, which
engendered that document. Until someone finds
convincing genetic evidence to the contrary,
women are biologically just as capable of leading
creative and productive careers in science as
men. So their historically low representation in
the physical sciences, for example, can only be
the result of systemic societal deficiencies that
inhibit or discourage their participation.

Why has progress toward equality been so
hard to achieve? This is not an easy question for
people with backgrounds like mine, and I suspect
most of yours. We are used to solving problems
on blackboards, computer terminals and
lab benches, where we can manipulate equations,
data sets and integrated circuits. The
problem of the underrepresentation of women
in astronomy, and even more so in physics, is
nothing like the ones we’re used to solving.
Though numbers are often used to talk about it,
this is not a problem of numbers. It is insidious
and deeply entrenched in human psychology and
sociology — those very subjects we tended only
to dabble in or even shied away from because
they seemed so woolly and imprecise. There is
little comfort in knowing that our college friends
who did major in those subjects are not doing
much better than we are on this one.

A major impediment to addressing the problem
is that the causes of gender imbalance are
so widely diffused across society and the time
scales for effecting and observing change are so
long. The best astronomical analogy I can think
of is the Hubble constant. For most of my
career, I’ve had to carry around two numbers,
50 and 100 km/s-Mpc, each determined by a
different group of extremely capable and convincing
astronomers. There was no single explanation
for the factor of two between these disparate
values. Rather, the discrepancy came
from an accumulation of small differences of the
same sign at each rung of the distance ladder,
leaving us with embarrassingly different size
scales and ages for the universe.

The underrepresentation of women results
from a similar accumulation of small, subtle and
generally unintended effects, most of them of
the same sign. In Virginia Valian’s succinct
phrase, “… mountains are molehills piled one
on top of the other.” [NYT, Aug 25, 1998]. A
major distinction to my cosmic analogy is that
the career ladder for an astronomer has many
more rungs than the distance ladder to the
Virgo Cluster, and there are literally thousands
of baby steps she must take between rungs. So
while the retarding effects may be tiny, they add
up to cause much more than a factor of two in
almost every measure of female participation,
from high school physics classes to the rotunda
of the National Academy of Sciences. And
whereas decades of hard work are bringing us
close to convergence on a single value for the
Hubble constant, it has taken many more
decades to make significantly less progress in
eradicating gender bias.

The only way to make progress in achieving
gender balance is to match the wide diffusion,
deep entrenchment and long duration of the
causes of imbalance with a broad spectrum of forceful and sustained countermeasures. This, of
course, is the motivation behind most affirmative
action programs. But such formal programs
must be complemented by a host of collateral
actions, many of them informal, many tailored
to individual institutions or situations. An obvious
example is the need to address family issues — one, by the way, that also shows how often “women’s” concerns turn out be long neglected “human” concerns. Everyone will benefit from
the solutions.

We men must carry our fair share of the burden
for redressing gender imbalance. It is much
harder to break a glass ceiling by bashing it with
your head from below than by using a sledgehammer
from above. Because the ceiling exists,
most of those presently above it are men, so for
now their share is more than half the load. So
long as men hold most of the positions of
power, they must accept the
bulk of the responsibility that
comes with it. It is also appropriate
that men at all levels take
responsibility for redressing
gender inequities in the same
sense that whites must take
responsibility for addressing
racial inequities — whether or
not any one of us feels personally
at fault, we are collectively responsible for
past and present abuses.

There are also several reasons some women
may be inhibited about appearing too forceful
on the issue of gender bias. Women in science
already bear enough of a burden overcoming the
retarding forces to their advancement that cause
the imbalance. Junior women particularly face
the very difficult dilemma of wanting both to be
accepted into the club and to change the bylaws.
In astronomy, as in most academic pursuits,
peer recognition is the most important
form of remuneration (and one which affects the
more tangible rewards like promotion and
salary). Again, most of the senior “peers” are
men, so women must feel some sense of risk
associated with speaking out on gender issues.
Many courageous women have acted forcefully
in spite of these risks.

One cannot address the issue of gender balance
and affirmative action without confronting
the goblin of “special treatment,” implying“lower standards.” I have yet to meet a woman
scientist who wants any such special treatment,
nor have I met any that received it. But concerns
by professional women that their efforts to level
the playing field would be seen as attempts to
fix the game loom very large in most discussions
of affirmative action. Unfortunately, opponents
use this weapon to taunt women who are succeeding
in the face of discrimination and to discourage
them from speaking out about gender
bias. Again, men have a responsibility to exorcise
this specter.

One example of how cooperative action by
men and women can bring about major change
can be found in the recent experience of the
MIT School of Science, which just recently
made the front pages of the Boston Globe and
New York Times. In this case the concerted
efforts of a group of tenured women faculty,
together with the decisive actions of a male dean
and several department heads, uncovered serious
problems and then addressed them.

Four years ago, a committee on women faculty
in the MIT School of Science identified real
inequities that explained a deep discontent that
had been shared by all the tenured women faculty.
(In contrast they found general satisfaction
among their junior female colleagues.)
They also found that
the fraction of tenured women
faculty in science stagnated at
MIT for 20 years, during which
time the female representation
among students soared and
most of us thought real progress
was being made across the
board. They describe the dean’s
immediate and substantive actions to correct the
most egregious problems, and how profoundly
things changed, including a rapid increase in the
fraction of tenured women faculty. To quote: “One senior woman faculty described the outcome
of this collaboration as ‘more progress for
women faculty at MIT in one year than was
accomplished in the previous decade.’ ”
(The report is available at web.mit.edu/fnl/
women/women.html. See also “MIT Women Win
Fight Against Bias,” STATUS, June 1999.)

The challenge remains to consolidate such
successes and multiply them manyfold. Progress
must be accelerated, not simply continued. The
MIT report notes that even at the recently
increased rate of adding tenured women faculty
it would take 40 years before 40% of the science
ranks were women. And that assumes that
the pipeline can support this pace. So our goal
must be to drive the system non-linearly, to keep
the needle of progress pinned at maximum. This
may be different from measuring the Hubble
constant and it may even be harder, but surely it
is time to rededicate ourselves to the task.